


In His Dreams(He's A Man)

by BadWolf256



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:36:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27581468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadWolf256/pseuds/BadWolf256
Summary: Three years after Elena Gilbert died, he made his way back to the city. Or, an A/U in which Elena is left, Elijah is determined, and Silas is dealt with differently.
Relationships: Elena Gilbert/Elijah Mikaelson
Comments: 3
Kudos: 32





	In His Dreams(He's A Man)

Three years after Elena Gilbert died, he made his way back to the city. He had half a tank of gas in his car, bought with compelled, stolen money, and the warning his brother had given him loud. _You loved her once,_ Niklaus had told him, _You shouldn’t do it again._ He’d been crying when Niklaus said it, and his brother had proffered a shoulder to him, held him like his mother did; once, when he was a boy. When he was a boy, Elijah had thought, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel, and feeling the heat of the rubber - When he was a boy, he wouldn’t have done it. Known somebody like her. _Loved_ somebody like her. When he was a boy, he would’ve grown up to be living, and honest, and kind - all of those things Elena had been that long ago he had abandoned. But in the thousand years since his father ran him through with a broadsword, many parts of him had changed. Underneath the burning sun, he saw her like a mirage; her hair a dark, flowing curtain, her eyes spiked with whiskey and hazel; the hint of a forlorn smile curving over her lips. Elena’s fingers laced between his, and it had taken Elijah a moment too long to realize that she wasn’t there.

*

In Mystic Falls, Virginia, nobody slept in the dark. When Elijah’d rolled into town, the sky had been full of a burgeoning dusk and gasoline fumes, waiting to be kindled into a flame. The town had been much as he’d left it - still rustic, in that way that small towns tended towards, with an air of being one that even heartbreak and death had not broken. He could tell, though, that they had touched it, and left their marks of grime and pain and dirt on every doorstep. The houses’ placid colors had spoken of loneliness to him, and the letters that had fallen from the Grilll’s sign during the last winter’s storms hadn’t yet been put back up. Still, Elijah’d heard laughter; distantly, in the woods. Out by the ruins of Fell’s church, kegs had been set up for Bonfire Night, and shadows had still lain thick over the plankings of Wickery Bridge. At the heart of town, where the old Council Building had once stood, the flickering lights of a cheap hotel’d beckoned out with perpetual vacancies. The Salvatore Boarding House, secluded behind a wall of dry branches and overgrown weeds, might perhaps have been the worst of it; seeing it through his windshield, he’d felt his heart break in his chest.

When Elijah’d known the Boarding House, it had been contentious, but even then, it was alive. Alive with Stefan Salvatore’s brooding, and Damon’s resolute refusal to let others choose for themselves; his firm and solid conviction that he, alone, was responsible for hard decisions. Alive with Caroline Forbes’ rapid-fire directives that left no room for arguments, and every argument that had sent Elena home crying, and though he had hardly been able to think about it, alive with the warmth of her spirit. But by then the windows were boarded up, and the hearty wood covered in dust. Elijah’d parked his car and killed it; heard, over the dying sputter of the engine shutting, footsteps through the old house’s walls going still. Which one of them was it, he’d wondered? The one that he had owed nothing to, or the one he had come there to kill? The footsteps had been confident, steady - but that could be either one of them, he had thought. There were many kinds of confidence in the world. If it were anywhere else, it would have taken him less than a minute to get to the door, but Elijah’s hands and body had trembled, and he’d let himself take his time. His gaze had wavered from the door to the window of her room - not her childhood room, no, where he’d held her as she cried, the night she’d learned she was a pawn - but the room she’d shared with Damon, pretending to be happy when they had both known that she wasn’t. He could’ve sworn her heard her; the hard edge had grown in her voice as the months had worn on, and her determination to save those she loved, whatever the cost. _You’ve paid for it dearly,_ Elijah had thought, and winced. He had stood at the door then, and wondered if he would have to wait for it to swing open.

He’d not been kept waiting for long.

“Elijah?” She’d said, and his heart - shattered, and yearning, reaching out to close on staleness - had stuttered.

“Elena,” He’d told her. “You died.”

To this day, she hasn’t denied it.

*

Elena’d led him through the empty hallways into the devoid sitting room. When she was in school, a fire would have burned in the grate, but that day it had borne no logs, no welcoming tendril of flame, to allow his mind a respite. Elena’s steps hadn’t been ghostly; they were as real and as present as anything else, though he had not been able to help noticing that she’d walked with a strong, stilted limp that had thrown her whole frame off balance. There had been no wound he could see.

The Elena who let him inside had worn a black skirt that fell to her ankles, and a long sleeved shirt he’d imagined had belonged to Damon, despite no sign of the Salvatore brothers greeting him once he was seated. He’d heard her brace herself against the kitchen walkway and inhale a nearly inaudible hiss; the whistle of the kettle as water was set to a boil. She’d sat him down on the couch he had once hovered over, examining Katerina’s immortality potion and hoping that it would work. And what a notion _that_ was, he’d thought, as the minutes had stretched endlessly on and the rustle of boxes, the pouring of tea, had floated in through the cold, open hall.

“Lemon?” He’d asked, upon her return. She’d slid the cup towards him and sat herself, arms crossed over her chest. He’d looked at the tea cup instead of at her, chipped from a fight that he’d rather not have known about. It was easier that way, somehow.

“I put some honey in, too.”

“Thank you,” He’d said - honestly, his nerves shot raw and his voice threatening to crack, though he would never have let it come out. A tense silence had unfolded, wherein Elena had blinked, as if she were holding back tears, and reached a hand out that never came to its rest.

“Elijah,” She’d said, finally. “I don’t know - Why are you here?”

“He told me you’d died,” He had said, swallowing his apprehensions, his blind, growing panic, and resolving to _listen_ to her. There must, he had thought, be a rational explanation. But Elena had only shrugged her shoulders, and he’d seen a fierce tremor wrack its way up her side, culminating into a hitched, staggered sob. The cadence of it had been purely Elena, so human that he nearly hadn’t known what he should believe. Elijah had dragged his eyes up to her; took her in suddenly, starkly. He’d sucked in a harrowing breath. Dark hollows had settled in her eyelids, and every bone in her body had shown through her skin, pale and wane. Her greasy hair had hung, long and lank, to her waist.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Elena had said. “No one should be here, Elijah, that was the deal.”

“The deal?” He had asked, wetting his lips - and were they really going to do this, he’d thought? Tiptoe around the fact that if she wasn’t dead, she was dying? There was something infinitely lovely about her, or at least there should have been. But the light he’d mourned so dearly had been nowhere to find, and the sweetness of the tea she’d made him had felt like grit on his teeth. “What deal?”

“Forget about it,” Elena had said. “I’m sorry, but you need to leave.”

“Before I finish my tea?” He’d asked her. “Forgive me. I hadn’t realized your hospitality would be so… limited.”

“Fair enough,” Elena’d said, and tilted her head in defeat. “But the deal - “

“Whatever it is,” Elijah had told her, keeping his voice sure and steady, “I assure you, it will be handled.”

Elena had huffed out a laugh then, something sardonic that had not belonged on her lips.

“Who told you,” She’d asked, “That I died?”

“My brother,” Elijah had said, feeling his mind start to whirl. It was a good thing, he’d thought at the time, an admirable thing, his desperate need to put all the pieces together. In the end, it could do her no harm. There was a deal involved - that was the first thing he’d known with any certainty - and the woman that he had so loved, when doing so was not his bane, had been slowly turning to dust. The look of her, the sound of her, lacking, had told Elijah what he had not wanted to know: There was no way to rectify it, none that would not be futile. A thousand fragmented images had roared their way through his head, potential futures that he had missed, leaving so quickly, and set. He’d pictured her kissing Damon, and the split lip Rebekah had crooned about so gleefully that one Thanksgiving; he’d pictured her on the stage for her graduation, grinning in high heels, exhausted; he’d pictured her coming back for him, just as she’d told him she would. Mayhaps none of them came to pass, or ever, he had thought, would. To see her - to be near her again, no matter how battered, and feel the heat of her living breath - that day, it had been enough.

But only until she began.

“Your brother told you I died?” She’d asked him, looking as if she was chewing on unwanted thoughts, “If it isn’t too forwards, which one?”

_If it isn’t too forwards -_ there was a nuance in that, Elijah’d picked up, that hadn’t been there before. A careful choosing that had belied the adult she’d become, and laid to rest forever the child that she had once been. A pang of sadness had rippled through him and twisted itself into a sorry pride. It had taken him far long than a few years to learn how to act as Elena did then, and he’d discovered that he respected how the lines of her youth had strengthened into those subtler forms of defiance. The keen blade of strategy, properly wielded, could bring grown men to their knees. Elijah had known that well enough, and seen it done more than once, but had never expected that it should be employed by Elena Gilbert; the sweet and inherently lovely girl he’d left behind.

“What happened to you?” Elijah had asked - he had not shrunk from the fear in her face when he used what he’d made of himself; the coldness of manner, the utter _intimidation_ in which he steeped his voice, and the calm, unperturbed blankness of knowing that he would be answered, lest head be parted from body. Elijah’d watched Elena gulp, an entirely _new_ kind of spasm sidling through her bones. She had plead with him, in a wordless look, and he’d cast away his fury, his anger, to meet her completely nonplussed. “Don’t make me ask twice,” He had said. Yet, Elena had said,

“I can’t tell you,” And the anguish of it had felt like a knife in his gut.

“By whose order?” Elijah had asked.

Elena had shaken her head.

“Were you compelled?” Elijah’d inquired, “To give up on yourself, and allow those who love you to think that you’d burned to ashes??”

Elena’d barked out a huff.

“Have you seen me, Elijah?” She’d asked him, “I burned to ashes years ago.”

“This deal,” He had said, pressing onwards - unable to think of what she was saying, how _lonely_ she must have felt, watching everyone she cared for caught up as collateral damage, helpless to sway the tide of her nature, the nature of her cursed fate - “You will tell me by whom it was offered to you. What it entailed.”

“And then?” Elena had asked him, and he’d fervently prayed that he did not imagine the faint glimmer of hope that had shone through the weary.

“And then,” He’d said, “It will be handled. It will not be allowed to constrain you.”

“That isn’t your choice to make,” She had told him, and Elijah’d repressed a flinch. “You’ll say that it’s the best thing for me - to be free, to be - to be _happy._ Have you honestly forgotten what happened the last time I got to be that?”

“I -“

“My brother died,” Elena had said. “They _killed_ him, Elijah. He’s gone.”

And all of Elijah’s carefully mounted defenses - the web of logic and passivity he’d forced himself to don until he could face her again - they’d been finished. They might as well have never been there. Elijah’s fingers had twitched on the velvet upholstery, and the twitching had galvanized them to clench into fists. A flash of his darkness must have shown, for Elena’d shrunk back, and in a second has hand had been on her wrist, holding a firm pressure there. He remembers even now the feeling of her, hot like a furnace and _freezing._

“Jeremy,” She had said, “Oh _God,_ Elijah, _Jeremy -_ “

There had been no thinking, no taking of time to ask himself if it was a good idea; he had simply, nonchalantly, pulled her into his lap. Her weight on his chest was the rightest thing he’d ever felt, and Elijah had let himself relish in her sheer _humanness_ as she’d given in to her tears. He had never done well at comforting others - that was more Niklaus’s wheelhouse, perplexingly - but his body had known what to do, how to run its’ hands over her back and reassure her of his solid there-ness, as her sobs had wet the front of his dress shirt and plastered it down to his skin. It could not have been the Salvatores, he had thought, though their conspicuous absence was noted. But once she had said it, his cursory glance around the Boarding House had made some deal more sense - it hadn’t been kept clean; rather, it had looked unlived in. And Niklaus’ report, too, had begun to make some kind of sense. It was not that she had died, per se, but that the light in her had - Elijah hadn’t been sure whether he should love of hate his brother for that fatal understanding, that willingness to save him, despite it making him cruel. The best he could do, Elijah had realized, was what Niklaus had done for him. Hold the woman he loved, apart from life’s daggers, while she lost herself to her grief.

In that mourning, he’d seen who Elena had been, seeping through the cracks rent into her flesh, perfuming the lonely halls with tangible, irrevocable _love._ And what he would have given to have her know she was loved like that, or to have been so loved himself. Elijah had fought to not scoop her up and flee - allow her to live inside of his heart, away from the prying eyes of life and its myriad, snarling wounds. Half of his muscles had tensed in preparation as the plan had formed in his mind: They would go to the Compound, and she would learn what it meant to be one of the Mikaelsons, showered with every protection and care that their amassed power afforded. But it was Elena - _his_ Elena - and Elijah had known better than thinking that she’d take the easy way out.

After a slow eternity, Elena’d reclaimed her own space. Her walls had been erected anew, meticulously reconstructed, but the gate at their stern was left cracked, and a rare vulnerability had called to him like a siren. At once she had been nothing and everything; burning and ashes and steam. She had been far too close to him for his comfort.

“It wasn’t -“ She’d said, “You don’t know him.”

“Who?” Elijah’d asked.

“Silas.”

_*_

At a booth in the Mystic Grill, Elena’d picked over a plate of runny eggs and told him of Silas’s deal. She’d spoken monotonously, without any hint of emotion, and he had understood why. It wasn’t the type of thing one _could_ say, if they wished to continue to feel. The deal was simple enough - Elena’s blood, the very force of her life, in exchange for the safety and shelter of those he would otherwise have disposed of. Immunity, on the condition of their leaving her to languish. That Jeremy had died was not revealed to her at the start - it was a precaution, Silas had said, against the return of her line.

The Salvatores had been the first ones to leave, though they had put up a fight. There was some of that, Elijah had known, that Elena had withheld from him, but previous experiences had disabled his curiosity regarding it. They had been followed by the witch, Bonnie Bennett; by Caroline Forbes, with whom Niklaus was so enamored, and Matt Donovan, the town bartend; as well as anyone else whom had harbored Elena affections. He had heard of Silas, once before, from his youngest brother, Kol. Those too were words that Elijah had best thought forgotten, though the way Elena had spoken of him had made a shiver wheedle through his bloodshot nerves.

“He wants to die,” Elena had finished with, pushing her plate away from her. She had barely eaten a thing. “There was this woman he loved, Amara, and he - wants to be with her again.”

Elijah had sighed a long, knowing sigh.

“Would you not?” He had asked her, speaking without thinking first, and biting down on his tongue.

“I don’t know,” She had told him, a hint of buried pain creeping into her voice. “It’s not easy like that, anymore.”

“Your leg?” He had asked, and again, Elena had shrugged.

“Necessary,” She’d told him.

“You were harmed,” Elijah’d said - snarled, more like, but Elena had had no reaction. He’d found himself overflowing with rage; at the world, at himself, and at Silas, indistinguishable from one another and in equal measure. “How could it have been necessary?”

“Look at me,” Elena had told him, “With a limp like this, I can’t run away.”

“He thought you were Katarina,” He’d said, dipping low in stunned fury. In the back of his head, the dim irony had crossed his mind of it being the same tone he usually reserved for rooms with soft lamplight and fingers tangled in tresses; for pupils blown wide with desire. “He thought you would attempt to flee, so he maimed you.”

“It wasn’t -“

“And he thought there would be no consequence for it? He thought he could, what, get away with such actions as those?”

“He already has,” Elena had said, and Elijah had let slip a growl.

“He is a fool,” He had told her, “To start a war with my family.”

Elena’s pupils had blown wide then, but it had not been with desire.

“No,” She had told him, bristling with that strength, and the restlessness borne of hope.

“He hurt you,” Elijah had said, “You are precious to me, Elena. I cannot allow this to stand.”

“Yeah?” She’d said, “Well you sure as _hell_ can’t fight Silas. He’s five thousand years old and he eats vampires for breakfast. You won’t be able to beat him.”

“You have very little faith in me, Elena. I give you my word,” Elijah had told her, waiting for her reaction. Elena had tempered her wily, hopeful musings, and squared her shoulders to him.

“You told me that I was going to die once,” She’d told him, “When I was seventeen years old. You promised me that you’d keep my family safe. And now I’m eighteen, and I’m still going to die. But I don’t have a family, do I? Your _word_ means nothing to me.”

“It should mean something,” Elijah had told her - she’d thrown her head back, with a snort.

“It doesn’t.”

“Could it?” He’d asked her - shaking, in some deep part of himself whose name he had long since forgotten. Elena had blinked, and her mouth had fallen open; he’d wondered if she, too, was remembering part of herself, or if she was only revisiting better days, and would it make a difference, if she were? Elijah’d revisited better days himself sometimes, when he’d looked at the third doppelgänger and _felt_ his dead heart start to beat.

“It could,” She had said, “But it won’t.”

“What do you want me to swear on, then?” He had asked her, and she had blinked yet anew. “If my word alone matters not to you, then what does?”

“Swear on Alaric,” Elena had said, no trace of hesitation entering in. He had thought it strange, but understood, with what left of him had ever thought well of his father.

“Silas,” Elijah had said, darting his tongue out to wet his chapped lips, “Will not be permitted to live. I swear it in Alaric Saltzman’s name - And my own,” He’d said, holding a hand up, “Whatever that could be worth.”

“We have to be careful about it,” She’d told him. An unspoken thread of conspiracy, of deceit, had looped through the holes of their budding anticipations; shimmering, golden, and sleek. It had been merely certainty, though, for Elijah, the very same sureness that had driven him to part Trefor’s head from his body the first time they met, in that derelict farmhouse with the creaking stairs and the splintering light that had poured through the rotted-out beams. He’d often wished that he had been gentler with her, and used that meeting to prove to her what he hadn’t yet known for himself; that he had lifted her necklace off with a tender touch that raised goosebumps, instead of that ripping tear.

“Come to New Orleans,” Elijah had said. The words had hung there, half threat and half beg, and in her silence he’d heard the clack of billiard balls, and the clinking of glasses on tables, and unhurried conversations, and the million other tiny tasks from which they, by ill fortune, were cleaved. “I can keep you away from Niklaus; he would not look for you there. As far as my family is concerned, Silas is a common enemy.”

“I’m staying here,” Elena had said. “I can’t - _Klaus._ ”

“He has lost interest in you,” Elijah’d said, though it might as well have been a lie. Even in their closeness, he had known little of Niklaus’ schemes.

“I’m staying here,” She’d reiterated. “That was part of the deal.”

“The deal is null,” Elijah’d said, “Void.”

“To us, maybe. Not to Silas.”

Elijah had grinned, had let the tips of his sharp fangs show through; had felt and _savored_ the agony they could inflict, and taken the predator’s joy in the promise of that white heat. It was more than blood, more than drinking, and he had not helped but think that Elena knew it, hadn’t minded that in the least.

“He always wins, you know,” She had told him, the ghost of a smile encroaching.

“Good,” He had said, “So do I.”

*

He had said goodbye to her; they had lain out no rules, nothing concrete, and Elijah had dreamed about her, in moments both waking and sleeping, for many months after the day. New Orleans had not seemed his home that weekend, and the Compound had loomed like the Boarding House had, seeming to his eyes unlived in, unloved, and unknown. If not for Niklaus’ and his hybrids incessant fighting, he would have thought he was dead too - and when he had realized that they in fact were, he had broken down laughing. The sounds and the motions of it had been unfamiliar to him, so much a part of a bygone life that he’d almost not known what to call them, and their voracity had soaked his shirt with sweat as the choked, ruined noises strained him against his seatbelt. That was where Niklaus had found him - through his tortured laughter, he’d only gotten out _Silas,_ and his younger brother had pursed his lips and flared his nostrils menacingly. Elijah had started laughing again; even when he was a boy, he’d recalled, he had always been at least half wolf.

_Are we going to talk about this?_ Niklaus had asked, and just like that, Elijah had re-established himself.

_About you lying to me?_ He had asked, and watched the fear rise in his brother. _Yes, we most certainly are._ He loved making Niklaus afraid - there had been something beautiful in watching his brother succumb to the cold dread that marked them, above all, as creatures that once had been human.

Elijah prefers to forget those hours, those month; months of arduous research and endless fighting, broken mirrors and fragmented visions of Elena, wasting away. It would be months - years, even - between that day and the next he would see her, and they were horrible years, filled with terrible knowings that cut into his very soul; things he could not speak of even with Niklaus - Niklaus, who knew Elijah’s soul as well as his own, and in just what manner he should be made again to rekindle its calm, deadly fire. He would give himself snatches of rest in those years, languish among them just as if he were a ghost, and forever after look back on them as if he _had_ been a phantom, and not a participant. The story had come out without much prompting - without much prompting, where Nik was concerned, entailed at least one floor caving in under the weight of a tooth-and-fist beating, and several failed attempts to not raise his trigger-tensed hackles.

Firstly, Elijah had learned- not who Silas was, but who could lead them to him. It had been centuries since he’d even _thought_ of the Hunters, and remembering the forking, lightning-like pain of the dagger thrust in his back had forced his muscles to tighten and teeth to grit. The last time that he had been daggered, the last time he had thought _mattered,_ it had been Elena’s doing, and though her vervain necklace had been missing, he would never quite gather the courage to ask her if she’d been compelled. It had occurred to him then that it might be a fruitless endeavor, but he had heard her voice in his head then, ringing in him like church bells, and what were those to someone like him? Elijah did not believe in a ‘God’; Niklaus didn’t, either, though he often insisted he held some measure in that damned, inevitable ‘Fate’ that mortals let govern their lives.

From the Hunters, they’d gone to Rebekah, with no discussion over being or not being ‘they’. The closest they’d ever gotten to it was at night, in a hotel off the eastern seaboard, crawling North at the pace of a snail; because Elijah’d insisted on that. To save a human, they must walk in a human’s shoes. Niklaus must have thought it foolish, had angrily asked if he’d expected for them not to drink any blood on the journey, but even Elijah’d impeccable control had faltered at that, and the overdue surge of self-hatred had risen and crested in him, bringing with it all the failings that used to keep him up at night. _How could anyone love you?_ They’d asked him, _After the things you have done?_ They had sounded, to his ears, disturbingly like his mother.

So one night, when the wind was high, and the late autumn heat had faded into a bearable humidity, he had foregone his self-imposed limitation on blood bags and found himself hunting, alone. Elijah had not been ashamed of himself in the way that his brother Finn was. He had not caught himself wishing that he were a man; not for himself, anyway. That Elena could rouse such a feeling in him - indeed, that anyone could - unnerved him to the extreme.

There had been a school dance that night, in a small town like Mystic Falls where prom was an occasion more solemn in its tradition than joyful, and Elijah had tracked a girl who’d played dress-up in her mother’s clothes through the shadowy heights of the suburbs, street-lamps bathing the sidewalk. Only a thousand years of making himself invisible had secured Elijah his meal. He would ask himself, later and sick, what had made him do it like that; feet from her doorstep, with neither remorse nor restraint, he had dived, headfirst, into the pleasure of killing and draining. The girl had screamed when he bit her. His shoes and lips and greedy hands had already been wet with blood, and he’d shoved his slick fingers against her mouth, feeling her dull human teeth trying helplessly to break skin. The scrape and prick of them had reminded him of Elena; her incessant need to scrape and prick at the limits of her friends and family’s toleration of her martyrdom, with no regard for her own safety or well-being, and the sharpness of the impression had sent him stumbling backwards. He’d held the girl’s gaze for a moment - she had been dying, and she had known it. Her mind had just caught up.

Elijah had grappled for it, the throttling, unending death that his father had brought down upon him, but it hadn’t been there to find. A thousand years of bloodshed, of repressed emotions and unquenched, internal loves; of unfailingly built defenses and unwavering loyalties, had rendered it absent in him. All that had been left of it was the revelation of consciousness. Sentience, that stunning gift, but where, oh where, could it have _come_ from? One never realized, until it was going and gone. He had bitten the girl on her neck, and the roughness hadn’t been clean. She’d lost her blood slowly, and begging. _I give you my word,_ he’d told Elena, and had understood as he watched the girl die why it had been naught to her.

The girl bled to death on her doorstep that night, and Niklaus had smoked in the chair by the side-table in their hotel room. He had gotten one bed out of spite. _You look like you’ve been through hell, brother,_ he’d said, as Elijah stripped himself of his blood-sodden suit and turned the faucet for the shower. In his peripheral vision, he’d seen Niklaus flick his cigarette butt into the ice bucket, smiling to himself as if some inner thought had been confirmed. _I’m going there,_ Elijah had told him. He said it in the same way he said everything, and he had loathed that way of speaking. People assumed that he thought before choosing his words, and he’d thought that it might have been true, but some things could not be said once you’d thought about them, and somehow not even a thousand years had taught him to keep those inside.

_I am, too,_ Niklaus had told him, holding a fresh cigarette out. The snap and the catch of a lighter, and it was ablaze. Elijah had taken it; cradled it between his scarlet-stained lips like the harbinger of a new life.

_You didn’t have to come with me,_ he’d said. The smoke had washed the taste of the blood out, but not the want of the hunter, that uncontrollable ferver that had driven him, in the earliest days of his vampirism, to raze whole villages with his fangs.

_Always and forever,_ Niklaus had told him. _Just like the good old days._

They would never speak of it again.

*

Rebekah, predictably, had been holed up in New York, a bustling city, albeit sans Mardi Gras. The clamor of it had suited her petulance, the chaotic beauty which her temperament rarely let anyone see. She had done well for herself - _A bit of compulsion and you can have anything, can’t you?,_ she’d said, remarkably childlike and devastatingly self-assured. It was Rebekah who had sulkily narrated the whole sordid Hunter story, her throat and windpipe clogging with tears and her fingers wrapped spasmodically around a far too full glass of whiskey. Niklaus had grown bored with it, and wandered, trusting him to pick up on every relevant detail. And when he had gone, Elijah’d hated his sister, wresting the glass from her and pouring half into a new one. Rebekah had compelled the bartend - no one was going to stop him - and he’d seen so much of himself in her that she might as well have been a mirror.

“You don’t have to tell me,” He’d said.

“Why?” She’d asked, “Are you really that sorry for me?”

“No,” He had said, borrowing one of Elena’s shrugs, “I merely - Sister,” He’d said, dragging her attention to him. Rebekah was like a flash flood; everything she felt rushed out of her all at once, and when she was still, she was still as a river in spring, poised and enraptured, _captivated_ by words. “I wish to understand where we can find these Hunters, and how best we might bend them to our will. As for the rest, I merely do not wish to know.”

“As for the rest?” Rebekah had asked him. “Alexander, you mean? I loved him, Elijah. I loved him with everything that I had! He told me that we would be married -“

“As for the rest,” Elijah’d repeated, “I merely do not wish to know.”

Rebekah had scowled - her tragedy had converted itself into anger, and Elijah had sighed. It was a harrowing process, but he’d known how to handle her anger, how to reach inside it and pull out the evasive answers her temper so blithely obscured.

“What do you care about the Hunters?” She’d asked him, “What could you _possibly_ want from the Hunters, Elijah? What do they _matter_ to you?”

And Elijah had thought of a different world, a world where their love for each other had not been poisoned, destroyed; where he would have reached towards his sister’s sleeve and tugged her back into her body, anger and tragedy all. _I love someone,_ he would have told her, and Rebekah would not have responded, would not have _needed_ to say anything in response, for all that she’d have done the same, if _she_ were the one in love. They’d have tilted their glasses of whiskey together and drank, and Elijah would have exhaled and said something kind to her. The kind of thing that Elena might say. The kind of thing every brother should say to their sister, finding that they are in turmoil. _Why do you love her?,_ she would have asked, and Elijah’d have thought about that - thought, and found no good answer, for there never is one, not where love is concerned. _Because I do,_ he’d have said, and just for that afternoon, they would be family.

“My dealings with the Hunters are none of your concern,” He’d told her, “Neither is your - personal life any of mine.”

“You think I’m a loose woman, don’t you?” She’d asked, all pout and no forethought, and the image of that different world had been banished; exiled, like all the futures Elijah had once hoped to have.

“I don’t think you’re a woman at all,” He had told her. “One would think you’d act like one by now, if you wanted to be seen as such.”

“Fuck you,” Rebekah had told him, and hit him. “You’re just as bad as Nik is - You’re _worse_.”

The slap had burned him, but not because of the mark it had left on his cheek. It had healed as quickly as it had appeared, though he’d wished for a moment that he could bear it, for once; that his bearing of it, some mark of shame, could be _something,_ even if it was all that he could ever offer. She’d knocked her whiskey back in one sitting, and then she had gathered her forces.

“You want to hear about the Hunters, Elijah?” She’d asked him. “You’re going to sit through it _all._ ”

*

Five years after Elena Gilbert died, he’d found the sword that would undo Silas.

Elijah had lied to himself, as he cleaned it; he’d done it, that cleaning, every day. A ritual of his honor, his loss. What they had lost, along the way - it could not be said out loud. When Elijah slept, he dreamt of the stairwell of Elena’s family home, and the startled-doe look of her, suddenly coming upon him. He’d kissed her there, in the dreams. She could not get so much as a word out in them, and his lips were on hers, fingers wheedling through her smooth, dark hair, pushing each tender, jagged _ounce_ of himself into the softness of her; each mistake and regret, each orchestrated betrayal caught like sugar on his tongue, tangling up with hers. She had plenty of them - most of them, he’d known, unfounded - and in his dreams, they too had tasted like sugar. The clean, fresh sugar of spring in the air; the sultry, jazz-tinged sugar of coffee and beignets; the warm, winter sugar of marshmallows in hot chocolate, melting a persistent cold snap.

In his dreams, he’d been a man.

When the sword was cleaned, he would shave with it, swiping the heft of the blade over his barely-there stubble, and when he was shaved, he would push down a little too hard, but with that same patented precision; watch the cut form on his chin, and the flesh knit itself back together. _You are not human,_ Elijah would tell himself. _Stop acting like you’re a boy._

Two years had been born and slain since the day Elijah had seen her, and learned about her deal with Silas; twenty-four months in which he had not been idle, in which the nature of the doppelgängers had been revealed and the Other Side nearly unraveled. Two years in which Niklaus had wrought his iron fist down on the heads of the Travelers, and the names Qetsiyah and Amara had become as taboo as Tatia’s had been; in which the Elena that lived in his dreams had kissed him like Katarina, and he, in shameful lust, had used and abused her. Two years in which Niklaus had told him, at every opportunity, that he must ask for more information. _Call her,_ he’d said, _And tell her to help us. If she loves you -_

Two years of not letting Niklaus finish.

There had been reasons, Elijah was sure, for their mutual estrangement. They hadn’t said, when he left her, that they wouldn’t speak until Silas was killed; that he would not come back and visit, knowing her loneliness, her absence from the world of the living, and Elena’s absence from her. But Elijah had known as he walked away that he could not do it - could not look at Elena’s body, not if she wasn’t there. He was haunted by his last glimpse of her. She had worn her own death on her sleeve.

And Silas had not been idle.

Elena brought it up, at the start. _He wanted to die,_ she would say, _But at least if was for the right reason. Elijah, it was for_ love -

What could he say to that?

_You’re being foolish,_ he’d tell her, pouring his heart into it, so that it would not cause her pain. Perhaps they had agreed on that too - that he would hurt her, for as long as she was alive, but that she would not let herself feel it; that she would not let what he said scar, even if it was true. Still, when he makes love to her - beneath him, because of her leg - he traces them. They are silvery scars, virulent scars, of tears unshed and mothers perished and being too _much,_ too _themselves_ when their bodies are touching. Three wishes, tossed into a well:

No sight, no harm, and no remembrance of the day Silas was desiccated, the sword thrust through his stuttering chest, and his claim over their plane relinquished.

_Remember seeing me,_ she says, whenever it’s on his mind - and Elena, sweet, _lovely_ Elena, knows when it’s on his mind. _Remember_ anything _besides that,_ she says. So he does.

*

Five years after Elena Gilbert died, he made his way back to the city. In Mystic Falls, Virginia, nobody slept in the dark, and it had been dark, when he got there. He had driven all day, and well into the night, propelled by a yearning so clear and so bright that it had spotted his vision and encased even his ability to form coherent thought in a dazzling, mesh-like fog. _Silas is dead,_ he’d thought would tell her. He’d drummed his fingers against the steering wheel rubber; it hadn’t been hot, in the dark. _Just as I promised he would be._ He’d memorized the smile that it would invoke, every tilt and wrinkle of it, and the crystalline keel of her teeth.

The Boarding House had been waiting for him, and so, he’d seen, had Elena. She’d sat, asleep, on the steps that led up from the driveway, shivering in the chilly night on the unforgiving concrete. _But I forgive you,_ Elijah had thought, not knowing, until then, that he would. _I forgive you, Elena. I do._ She’d slanted harshly against her bad leg - Elijah will never forget the first time he properly saw that leg for as long as he lives, the desperation with which he had asked, and been denied, that she drink his blood to heal it - and the rushing wind had taken up her pained whimpers, carrying them away to die. Elijah had shut his eyes tightly and breathed them in, holding them in his lungs. _Why do you love her?_ Rebekah’d have asked him, in a different world -

_I don’t rightly know,_ he had thought, _My heart, it gives me no choice._

And so he had crept to Elena’s side, as quietly as he could, and lifted her sleeping form. It was _more_ to hold, than the flickering cigarette, but he heard the words anyway, just as he’d written them to her, just as Niklaus had said them. _Always,_ he’d thought, _And forever._ Niklaus had been in New Orleans, regaining whatever territory he’d lost, in those two years; Rebekah, his _stubborn_ Rebekah,had found a new boy in New York and blocked their numbers on her phone. But he, himself, _Elijah_ \- he had stood at the Boarding House threshold, holding Elena’s slightness, and rocked back and forth on his heels. The shape of her had shifted; her eyes had blearily opened, and she had muttered, into the wind and the love and the sorrow,

_“S’okay. You can go in.”_

He’d settled her in one of the guest beds that night, wrapped her in blankets and pressed a kiss to her forehead. He’d lingered there for too long.

“ _Stay with me,”_ Elena had asked - caught there, halfway between sleeping and waking, like an insect in amber - but Elijah had known that she wouldn’t remember, tomorrow, and sighed out the breath he’d pushed down. _Stay with me,_ he had thought, pouring a fifth of Damon Salvatore’s bourbon and setting a fire to burn -

The love he bore her had implored him, somehow, but he’d never promised her that.


End file.
